Laura Harrier's Got the Range

I play a character named Patrice who is a black power activist sort of along the lines of a Black Panther. She wouldn’t have been a Black Panther because this is in Colorado and they didn’t have a chapter then but it takes place in the early ‘70s. She’s the head of the Black Student Union at Colorado College so she’s really stirring up stuff in the community and leading protests and people start getting mad. My character wasn’t a real person but she was very much based off of Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown—women of the black power movement that I don’t think we’ve really seen on film before. I got to meet Kathleen Cleaver, which was insane, and really just get into the research and learn more on what that movement was about. What we’ve been told and fed is very much like what the FBI narrative was at the time. J. Edgar Hoover said they’re the biggest threat t...